17 ups and downs of working on the family farm

Like most of our readers, many of the journalists at Farmers Weekly are from farming families and have grown up working alongside their parents.

For the most part we loved it (our parents certainly aren’t the reason we all decided to leave the farm to work in agri-journalism) but there are the odd niggles that we would like to share with you, as we suspect we are not alone in this.

3. You are expected to be a mind reader. Dad has some elaborate plan of how he sees a job working out, what needs to happen when, what you need to do and so on. Does he share this information with you? No. Does he shout at you when it all goes horribly wrong? Oh yes.

4. Mum and Dad will always to tell you how to do a simple task that you’ve done countless times before, as if you’re from the planet Mars and you’ve never seen a drench gun before.

5. A bitterly cold winter’s night feeding the cattle means Dad presenting you with endless silage bales in the jaws of the tractor grab to cut open and unwrap. Got a slap in the face from the juicy, semi-frozen black plastic? That wouldn’t happen if you moved a bit quicker.

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